Scan failed

A scan is marked failed when a hard step cannot finish. VisibleMax runs crawl → analyze → probe under Trigger.dev. Crawl and core analysis must succeed for a usable report; probe enrichment can soft-fail without wiping the report.

Hard failure vs soft failure

Common causes

• Unreachable site — DNS NXDOMAIN, connection refused, or HTTP errors on the homepage
• SSL / certificate problems — expired, mismatched, or incomplete chains
• Bot blocking / WAF — Cloudflare, firewall, or bot challenges that block crawlers
• Timeouts — crawl or analysis exceeded time budgets on large or slow sites
• AI provider key missing (probe only) — platforms skip; usually not a full scan failure
• Free plan already used — lifetime completed scan consumed; start is blocked until Pro

Recovery steps

1. 1

   Read the scan error

   Open the scan detail page and copy error_message / status. Match it in Common errors.

2. 2

   Verify the URL

   Confirm the project URL uses the correct scheme (https://), host, and path. Fix redirects that loop or land on auth walls.

3. 3

   Fix reachability

   Resolve DNS/SSL and allowlist crawler traffic if a WAF is blocking. Details: Website unreachable.

4. 4

   Check plan gates

   If the UI asks you to upgrade, your Free lifetime scan is used. Upgrade to VisibleMax Pro — Early Adopter (7-day free trial, then $50/year) via Polar, or contact support if that is wrong.

5. 5

   Retry once

   Start a new scan after fixes. Avoid hammering retries — Trigger.dev already retries transient steps.

6. 6

   Escalate with evidence

   If it fails again with a public site, email support with project URL, scan ID, steps tried, and screenshots.

Edge cases

• Competitor / core mode — some jobs run crawl → analyze only (no probe). A missing probe section is expected, not a failure.
• Stuck in queued/running — may be orchestration delay, not failure yet. Wait a few minutes; see Slow scans.
• Failed after pages crawled — analyze-side issue; include scan ID and approximate page count when contacting support.
• Auth-only sites — public marketing pages scan; gated app shells often yield thin or failed crawls.

When to contact support

• Two consecutive failures after reachability is confirmed
• Error message is empty or generic with no matching doc
• Failure coincides with a billing change you already completed

FAQ